Sinister Street Volume Ii Part 12

Michael leaned over the parapet and saw the little people busy as emmets at the base of the tower on whose summit he had the right to stand.

Intoxicated with repressed adoration, the undergraduates sent hurtling outward into the air their caps, and down below the boys of the town scrambled and fought for these trophies of May Morning.

Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the heart of England. He had refused Maurice's invitation to a somewhat mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he was inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan, now sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After breakfast it would still be only about seven o'clock with a hot-eyed languor to antic.i.p.ate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which had so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate a much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.

It had been an early spring that year, and the country was far more typical than usual of old May Morning. Michael nowadays disliked the sensation of riding a bicycle, and though gradually the double irritation of no sleep and a long ride unaccompanied wore off, he was glad to see Lechlade spire and most glad of all to find himself deep in the gra.s.s by the edge of the river. Lying on his back and staring up at the slow clouds, he was glad he had refused to attend Maurice's mannered breakfast. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke the morning had gone and it was time for lunch. Michael felt magnificently at ease with the country after his rest, and when he had eaten at the inn, he went back to the river's bank and slept away two hours more. Then for a while in the afternoon, so richly endowed with warmth and shadows that it seemed to have stolen a summer disguise, he walked about level water-meadows very lush and vivid, painted with gay and simple flowers and holding in their green embroidered lap all England. Riding back to Oxford, Michael thought he would have tea at an inn that stood beside a dreaming ferry. He was not sure of the inn's name, and deliberately he did not ask what sweet confluence of streams here happened, whether it were Windrush or Evenlode or some other nameless tributary that was flowing into the ancestral Thames.

Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.

At the table another undergraduate was sitting, and Michael hoped a conversation might ensue since he was attracted to this solitary inmate.

His companion, however, scarcely looked up as he took his seat, but continued to stare very hard at a small piece of writing-paper on the table before him. He scarcely seemed to notice what was put on the table by the serving-maid, and he ate absently with his eyes still fixed upon his paper. Michael wondered if he were trying to solve a cipher and regretted his preoccupation, since the longer he spent in his silent company the more keenly he felt the attraction of this strange youth with the tumbled hair and drooping lids and delicately carved countenance. At last he put away the pencil he had been chewing instead of his food, and slipped the paper into the pocket of his waistcoat.

Then with an expression of curiosity so intense as to pucker up his pale forehead into numberless wrinkles the pensive undergraduate examined the food on the plate before him.

"I think it's rather cold by now," said Michael, unable to keep silence any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.

"I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better, I'd read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you now, you'd think I was an affected a.s.s," he drawled.

Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.

"They're all equally bad," the poet proclaimed gloomily. "What made you come to this inn? I didn't know that anybody else except me had ever been here. You're at the Varsity, I suppose?"

Michael with a nod announced his college.

"I'm at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest undergraduates in Oxford."

"I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary's," Michael suggested.

"Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary's man. I refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know."

"Oh, rather. In fact, he's rather a friend of mine. He's keen on starting a paper just at present."

"I know. I know," said the poet. "He's asked me to be one of the forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?"

"I was invited to be," Michael admitted. "But instead I'm going to subscribe some of the capital required. My name's Fane."

"Mine's Hazlewood. It's rather jolly to meet a person in this inn.

Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere else. But they've got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris weighing the charms of Helen--no--on second thoughts I'm being forced.

Don't encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?"

"I don't know," said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest roast chicken he had ever seen. "I think I missed a turning. I've been at Lechlade all day."

"We may as well ride back together," Hazlewood proposed.

After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford.

Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.

"Do you know many Balliol people?" he asked.

Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting in The Merchant of Venice.

"I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea they're keeping a chapel, or else it's a relief from the unparagoned brutality of the college architecture."

Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in ma.s.sive candlesticks of wrought iron.

"Mr. Fane of St. Mary's," said Hazlewood casually, and Michael was dimly aware of mult.i.tudinous nods of greeting and an unanimous murmur of expostulation with Hazlewood for his lateness.

"I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?" the chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.

"Forgot all about it," said Hazlewood. "But I suppose I can bring a visitor."

Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarra.s.sed by the implied criticism of the expostulation.

"Sit down," said Hazlewood peremptorily. "If I can't bring a visitor I resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us his carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediaeval Warfare."

"Don't be an affected a.s.s, Guy," said Comeragh. "You know you yourself are reading a paper on The Sonnet."

"Rise from the n.o.ble lord," said Hazlewood. "The first I've had in a day's fishing. I say, Fane, don't listen to this rot."

The company settled back in antic.i.p.ation of the paper, while the host and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his ma.n.u.script.

Michael found the evening a delightful end to his day. He was sufficiently tired by his nocturnal vigil to be able to accept the experience without any p.r.i.c.kings of self-consciousness and doubt as to whether this Balliol club resented his intrusion. Hazlewood's room was the most personal that so far he had seen in Oxford. It shadowed forth for Michael possibilities that in the sporting atmosphere of St. Mary's he had begun to forget. He would not have liked Tommy Grainger or Lonsdale to have rooms like this one of Hazlewood's, nor would he have exchanged the society of Grainger and Lonsdale for any other society in Oxford; but he was glad to think that Hazlewood and his rooms existed.

He lay back in a deep armchair watching the candlelight flicker over the tapestries, and the shadows of the listeners in giant size upon their martial and courtly populations. He heard in half-a-dream the level voice of Hazlewood enunciating his theories in graceful singing sentences, and the occasional fizz of a replenished gla.s.s. The tobacco smoke grew thicker and thicker, curling in spirals about the emaciated loveliness of an ivory saint. The paper was over: and before the discussion was started somebody rose and drew back the dull green curtains sown with golden fleur-de-lys. Moonbeams came slanting in and with them the freshness of the May night: more richly blue gathered the tobacco smoke: more magical became the room, and more perfectly the decorative expression of all Oxford stood for. One by one the members of the Chandos Society rose up to comment on the paper, mocking and earnest, affected and sincere, always clever, sometimes humorous, sometimes truly wise with an apologetic wisdom that was the more delightful.

Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most unjustly had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made up his mind to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that from it he might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with Hazlewood to the lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room would stand as representatives of the college.

"Yes, I should think so," said Hazlewood. "Why, are you making exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes an American to do that really well, you know."

"But what is the essential Balliol?" Michael demanded.

"Who could say so easily? Perhaps it's the same sort of spirit, slightly filtered down through modern conditions, as you found in Elizabethan England."

Michael asked for a little more elaboration.

"Well, take a man connected with the legislative cla.s.s, directly by birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are."

"Will that description serve for yourself?" Michael asked.

"For me? Oh, great scott, no! I'm utterly deficient in proconsular ambitions."

They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend after promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his acquaintance with Balliol.

When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with Wedderburn drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s. Both the promoters insisted that Michael should listen to their announcement before he told them anything about himself or his day.

_"The Oxford Looking-Gla.s.s" Avery began, "is intended to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought."_

"I prefer 'will reflect,'" Wedderburn interrupted, in ba.s.s accents of positive opinion.

"I don't think it very much matters," said Michael, "as long as you don't think that 'contemporary undergraduate thought' is too pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror, for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate thought ever reaches toward reality."